Benefits of Tweedy™ High Speed Mixing
While it’s widely accepted that the high-speed mixing ability of Baker Perkins’ Tweedy™ mixing system brings substantial benefits in greater throughput and consistency, few understand why this machine can mix dough so rapidly.
While it’s widely accepted that the high-speed mixing ability of Baker Perkins’ Tweedy™ mixing system brings substantial benefits in greater throughput and consistency, few understand why this machine can mix dough so rapidly.
A few skeptics insist that a high-speed process cannot possibly create a reliable, high quality dough.
The Tweedy™ typically mixes a batch of dough in three minutes – roughly 10 batches per hour, allowing for loading and discharge. Other machines – spiral and roller bar mixers, for example - achieve just three batches per hour as a rule.
The Tweedy™ mixing action is the key to high speed. Think back to traditional mixing by hand, when the dough was kneaded to begin the gluten development. Only a proportion of the dough was being worked at any one time, and then gently; conventional mixers act in exactly the same way.
Dough development is the crucial phase in mixing. It involves stretching gluten molecules so that a proportion of them break, and then reform as cross-linked bonds with other gluten molecules to build a network that gives the dough its elasticity. The rate at which dough is developed is directly related to how quickly molecules can be broken and bonds re-formed.
The Tweedy™ is carrying out the same process as other machines, but it is working all of the dough simultaneously and not merely a proportion of it. It achieves this because of the combination of a high-speed beater, and baffles on the periphery of the mixing bowl. As well as mixing the dough horizontally, the Tweedy™ beater is shaped so that it also generates a vertical motion – a 3D mixing action is present in all parts of the mass at all times.
Rapid mixing creates substantial benefits. Because the process is quicker and batch sizes smaller for a given output, the dough is passed through the divider to the prover before fermentation can begin, ensuring product consistency. If you do have to stop the line for any reason, you throw away less dough and can re-start more rapidly.
It is simply not true to suggest that the speed of Tweedy™ mixing damages the molecules in the dough: the reaction is the same at any speed. In fact, there are no drawbacks: if you can do a job better and quicker, why not?
Source: Baker Perkins
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